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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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In a review of
Rudyard Kipling’s notebooks, freshly published in 1920, Virginia Woolf observed
that much of his prose betrays an embarrassment about some desire he would
rather keep hidden. This rueful devotion produces, in Woolf’s view, the crude
shouting in his work, “Hurrah for the Empire!” plus its opposite gesture:
“put[ting] out his tongue at its enemies.” These crass and shallow dimensions
of his writing disguise his “feeling, perhaps, that a grown man should not
enjoy making bridges, and using tools, and camping out as much as he does.”
Woolf contends that Kipling’s vision is tragically flawed, since boyish
frolicking to glorify Empire “is the passion that gives his writing its merit,
and the excuse that vitiates it” (240).

Woolf’s
concession that there is “merit” in Kipling’s writing, despite its vaunting of
imperialism, supplies a more generous critique than that granted by the phalanx
of postcolonial critics for whom Kipling represented the apotheosis of
Victorian political turpitude. Yet part of the reason that the so-called “Bard
of Empire” has hung around beyond mere historical curiosity is the energy of
his work, its infectious passion that might catch even the least likely admirer
of boys’ adventurism in its sweep. The seminal postcolonial theorist Gayatri
Spivak once wrote that she “rather like[d] the so-called English
classics—shamefacedly in the way of a Kipling Bengali” (268). The trouble with
Kipling is that his works are so compulsively readable, even if they are
ideologically problematic—which makes him a perfect partner for Walt Disney.

The
pleasure of “making bridges, and using tools, and camping out,” as Woolf put
it, persists in the latest product from this durable partnership: Walt Disney
Pictures’s new live-action retelling of Kipling’s The Jungle Books. In
outline form, the plot of The Jungle Book (2016), directed by Jon
Favreau, hews closely to Disney’s original version, the animated musical from
1967 that turned Mowgli and friends—especially the friends—into deities in the
franchising and merchandising pantheon. Both versions tell of an abandoned
“man-cub” raised by wolves in an Indian forest, stalked by a ferocious tiger
with an English accent, and nurtured by a legalistic panther and a phlegmatic
singing bear. In both, the narrative arc is propelled by the tiger Shere Khan’s
bloodlust for Mowgli, though the plot detours into sequences with Baloo the
Bear, the duplicitous python Kaa, and the megalomaniacal Louie, King of the
Apes—all of which stand apart from the central storyline. Portions of Kipling’s
tales are extracted and deployed in a picaresque form, with little adventures
strung along by a primary motive to bring Mowgli back to the world of Men and
out of Shere Khan’s ravenous path. This structure allows for much
moment-by-moment excitement, but it leaves the film overall less memorable than
the individual set-pieces and songs.

Many
of the new film’s stylistic thrills are indebted to our current cinematic
moment. We meet Mowgli (Neel Sethi) mid-gallop, trying to run with his wolf
pack family and chased by a creature we are led to assume is a
predator—foreshadowing several later, unquestionably more hostile pursuits.
Mowgli’s un-wolf-like strategy includes bounding off of branches and swooping
from vines. Favreau noticeably displays his pedigree as a bankable, big-budget
action director, whose helming of this project likely is due to his success
with two of the Iron Man films and the kids’ actioner Zathura: A
Space Adventure. Zooming through the jungle with Mowgli has great aesthetic
kinship with Iron Man in flight. And, even more derivatively, the shaky-cam
tracking shots that follow the Lost Boy hero seem cribbed from the Daniel
Craig-James Bond series and its recurring scenes of super-spy parkour. All of
these entertainments Kipling himself might have admired, with his enthusiasm
for boyish adventure, but its fun feels as disposable and obligatory as every
other 3-D summer blockbuster jolt-fest.

Much
more interesting and revisionary is Favreau’s handling of Shere Khan, voiced by
Idris Elba. The Jungle Book (1967) was the final cartoon feature
overseen by Walt himself, and its adaptation from Kipling was tumultuous,
resulting in the firing of its original screenwriter and composer who Disney
thought were too faithful to Kipling’s dark vision. Favreau and company, to
their credit, inject more menace into their story, even beginning the film with
a scenario from Kipling’s story “How Fear Came,” in which predatory animals
declare a truce during a season of drought. Shere Khan is the lone critic of
this truce, proclaiming the opportunity for ridding themselves of the refugee
man-cub. The 1967 version of Shere Khan was a killing machine with George
Sanders’s devilishly posh accent, springing his claws and coolly slinking. The
new Khan via Elba is more wrathful—badly scarred and sporting a milky-blue dead
eye. His accent is noticeably hard-bitten, even proletarian, and his claim to
Mowgli’s blood comes not from his lawlessness, as it does in Kipling’s
originals, but from his insistence that a living man in their forest will
inevitably lead to fiery death. Men kill animals indiscriminately, Shere Khan
argues, and smart communities will exterminate a threat before it matures. With
(perhaps) unintentional echoes of current US political discourse, the tiger
promotes nativism, isolationism, and species-ism. He sounds alarmist, but he is
not wrong—men do bring the “red flower” and its consequences—and the wolves are
tempted by his logic. Giving plausible attractiveness to the orations of a
nativist demagogue is one of the boldest elements of this—or any other—Disney
film.

If
only the entire film were this consistently surprising. Much of Favreau’s
version is less a remake than a re-translation, channeling many of the best-remembered
bits from the original cartoon through state-of-the-art, whiz-bang technologies
that replace stilted cel-based animation. At the same time that the 2016
version gussies up the story technically, it strips back the relationships,
narrative, and characterization to a bare minimum, leaving several of the
characters, such as Mowgli’s wolf parents Akela (Giancarlo Esposito) and Raksha
(Lupita Nyong’o), merely sketches. Many iconic moments from 1967 return, as
Bagheera the Panther (Ben Kingsley), and Mowgli’s Falstaffian
partner/friend/exploiter Baloo the Bear (Bill Murray) echo their earlier
incarnations. Mowgli’s water-ride on Baloo’s belly, complete with a squirt in
the face is recreated in live action. Ditto the hypnotism by Kaa (Scarlett
Johansson), the crashing temple of King Louie (Christopher Walken), and the
lope-a-dope swings through jungle vines. Even a few of the unforgettable songs
return with celebrity voice actors giving distinctive renditions: Murray on
“Bear Necessities,” Walken doing “I Wan’na Be Like You,” and, over the closing
credits, Johansson with a sultry “Trust in Me.” These elements are undeniably
drenched in Disneyfied nostalgia, but they mostly succeed, like the amusements
of a well-rehearsed cover band rather than just displays of preening celebrity
self-indulgence.

Thankfully,
the film is almost devoid of the pop culture references “for the parents” that
became de rigueur after Robin Williams’s Genie in Aladdin (1992)
manifested his signature style of manic mugging. Having Baloo talk about Ghostbusters
or Bagheera tell us that he is “no Gandhi” are indulgences mercifully avoided
in Favreau’s movie. The celebrity voices themselves do, of course, function
with this multi-sectional appeal, inviting curiosity, for instance, about the
ways Baloo seems “Murray-esque.” The plummy baritone of Phil Harris as Baloo in
the 1967 version, whose lasting fame was secured with several other key voice
roles in Disney animation, including O’Malley in The Aristocats (1970)
and Little John in Robin Hood (1974), would seem irreplaceable. The
Jungle Book (1994), Disney’s all-but-forgotten first attempt at a live
action version, skirted the problem altogether by eliminating talking animals.
By contrast, The Jungle Book (2016) never quite allows the film-literate
viewer to shake the awareness of the actor behind the animal. When Mowgli first
peers into the darkness of Louie’s temple fortress, the unmistakable voice of
Christopher Walken croaks from the shadows, and Walken’s own jowly enunciation
matches his rendering as a gigantic ape. This absurdity combines with one of
the most blatant movie homages, as Louie tilts his head into the light while
eating a papaya, and, in Walken’s unique timbre, evokes Marlon Brando’s Kurtz
in Apocalypse Now.

The
nod to Coppola plays mostly as a witty in-joke for film buffs, but it resonates
well with the broadest themes of imperialism that Apocalypse Now
inherited from its source text, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Conrad and Kipling were near contemporaries, and though the former is far more
ambiguous about the value of colonial dominance, they shared a fascination with
the uncharted reaches of Empire. Kipling’s Jungle Books stories are a
little less overt in their “hurrahing” for Britannica than some of his other
works, such as his infamous poem “The White Man’s Burden,” which bemoans the
onerous task of British largesse toward colonial races that are “half-devil,
half-child.” But the imperialist undercurrent persists. In what remains my
absolute favorite adaptation of Kipling’s stories, Chuck Jones’s animated short
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi (1975), Orson Welles’s rich voiceover guides viewers
through an exciting tale of a mongoose protecting a British family from vicious
snakes in the garden of a colonial cantonment. The twangy sitar-themed score
and rampant exoticism match Kipling’s own obvious desire to impress homebody
readers with the sheer weirdness of other lands under British protection. And
the valiant mongoose who saves the magistrate’s family from evil cobras and their
children amounts to a celebration of the native collaborator who quells an
anticolonial revolution.

Disney
and Favreau shed most of the problematic dimension of Mowgli’s paternalism over
the animal races in a final message of togetherness and community rather than a
pax humana achieved through the violent threat of fire—a message hard to
escape in Kipling’s stories or Chuck Jones’s cartoon Mowgli’s Brothers
(1976). And yet, the message of “togetherness” at the end of The Jungle Book
(2016) seems somehow anemic compared with the ritual intoning of the “Law of
the Jungle” so vital to Kipling’s tales and Orson Welles’s sonorous
recitations: “For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the
wolf is the pack.” In the latest Disney take, this idea is also announced, and
the narrative makes some attempt to realize its meaning, but it is more
perfunctory than essential—barely necessary, indeed.

Charles Andrewsis Associate Professor of English at Whitworth University.